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Years ago there was a video on YouTube showing that geometric shapes appear in a vortex of water at different rates of spin. While it is neat that these shapes appear in atmosphere of another planet I have since assumed that it is the same dynamic as shapes in water vortices.
Water vortex shapes shift when you change spin rate though. Saturn's rotation isn't varying, so what's actually modulating the number of sides here, jet stream speed differences with latitude?
That matches the lab work — rotating tank experiments (Aguiar et al.) reproduced the hexagon by tuning differential rotation against jet width. Doesn't confirm Saturn's exact mechanism, but the shear-instability picture holds up remarkably well.
There is a talk amongst Astrophysics (not a serious one) that we showed up too late as a civilization, and Universes thrived at around 5 billion years after the big bang.
Now we are 13.8 billion years old, and the Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago.
That 7+ billion year gap is so huge, we cannot even detect any structures anywhere.
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My thoughts out of my @$$
The possibility is the Mars where there is a big scar on it, where it could have had been a space war, but cannot figure out as it's been billions of years ago.
Same for the Saturn. It could have had harboring another life form and try to protect itself with the thick atmospheric shield in the gas giant to avoid the demise the Mars has encountered.
Hmm. i think you need a universe at least 10bn+ years for intelligent life as you need to have had cycle of earlier stars going supernovae to create the heavier elements.
That aside, 13bn years old is young. literally an instantaneous flash in the context of all time until heat death of the universe.
>The possibility is the Mars where there is a big scar on it, where it could have had been a space war, but cannot figure out as it's been billions of years ago.
A Death Star ray just grazed Mars and ended up hitting Earth and killing the dinos. Coming soon on my Wattpad
Ship enough weird pitches at investors and eventually one sounds like Wattpad too. Doesn't mean it's wrong, just means someone's gotta build the boring version first and see if data holds up.
I like to think that the dark forest theory is real but its just AGIs out there letting meatbags create a new AGI, and then they just reset the planet.
"In addition to the difference in the number of sides," Sánchez-Lavega explained, "the decagon is situated at a less polar latitude than the hexagon in the southern hemisphere,
Just a thought: how do lengths of the sides compare between north pole's hexagon and this south pole decagon? Causes might be unclear but perhaps that side length corresponds to a 'wavelength' that's more-or-less a constant?
Taking in mind the gyrating hexagon that seems unique in the solar system (rings had been found in other planets) I propose to rename the sixth planet to Hexaturn.
(Or at least that particular cloud. The name is too good to not use it)
Ran into similar geometry troubleshooting fluid sims at work, decagon jumps out because number theory picks stable resonant modes at that latitude. Simulation angle's fun but sim wouldn't need to render weather this consistently.
Is it just me or does the dark blob in the center of the decagon look like a Mandelbrot set? The resemblance appears more acute in the images lower down in the article.
I think the images in the article are mosaics created from multiple images and the dark blob in the center is where their was no imagery because Saturn's south pole is currently tilted somewhat away from us. It has a 30 year orbit, and you can see in the images we are able to see closer and closer to the south pole each of the three years images were taken. The rough edges are just an artifact of image processing, and where individual exposures cut off.
Ran barotropic instability sims in grad school—wavenumber selection depends on the jet's shear profile, not some universal constant. A decagon (n=10) needs way steeper shear than Jupiter's hexagon (n=6) to survive that long.
Same thing on Jupiter, by the way, known since a long time.
I'd say that "structure" is click-baity, as it evokes some artifact.